


Bleeding Heart

by CAPSING



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: (both still dead though), Canonical Character Death, Fix-It, M/M, Possessive Behavior, Sibling Incest, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-29
Updated: 2019-01-29
Packaged: 2019-10-19 01:33:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17592197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CAPSING/pseuds/CAPSING
Summary: Noatak’s love is a twisted thing, but the Spirit World is a twisted place, so maybe it could fit there.





	Bleeding Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Writing fix-it fics for untimely character deaths, one fanfic at a time.  
> (This one is from May 2017)

After leaving home, Noatak find that everywhere else is too warm.

The world is trying to suffocate him, to press him down and make him yield; Noatak would not. He used to bend for his father, but he would not bend for anyone else, anymore.

He carries a part of home in himself; a block of ice in his chest. It keeps him cool when crying eyes plead up at him, it numbs his ears to the wind beseeching him to cease.

His ears had been numb for a while now.

It’s harder to breath when the mask is on. It’s his own personal rebellion to the world’s harsh judgement, a mutiny plain for all to see.

 

(Somehow, that what makes it easier.)

* * *

 

At some point, he discards his own name, taking another.

His boots track blood on his steps, and he swipes it all away with a flick of his wrist.

 

* * *

 

Amon is doing good.

The city is brimming with people and choking on apathy.

 

A person on their knees.

A parent.

 

Amon makes it so the children of tomorrow would be safe.

 

* * *

 

Noatak is thinking of ice. The sparkling tundra of the north of the earth, so bright he couldn’t look at it, the closest it could possibly be to the heavens.

Bright like Tarrlok’s smile.

He abandoned his brother, he knows, because between them, it’s not Tarrlok’s who needs to grow stronger, to fight against his own nature.

Like a coward, he escaped from everything he knew and left Tarrlok to face their father’s insatiable wrath, alone.

(But that’s Noatak’s burden, and it has been thrown away long ago by Amon, somewhere along with a worn pair of leather boots.)

 

* * *

 

 

When everything is too loud and oppressing, Amon slips away in a bubble. He steps on the ocean’s floor, with its weight pressing down on him, just waiting for him to crack before the waves would crash down on him.

In the bubble, he can admit those awful things aloud. The fish don’t stop to take a listen. The corals witnessed worse.

In the bubble of his own making, he can remember how it felt, his brother’s form crumpling to his will. His brother’s kindness – his own unmaking, like a lamb to the slaughter. Amon’s own twisted core, which he’d spent hours and days and weeks and months trying to untangle, attempting to bend himself back into a healthy way of mind.

In the bubble, Amon knows his iron will was bent out of shape by his upbringing – and try as he’d might to straighten it back into shape, it would always remain a bit off, never quite much as it used to be.

Because if Noatak was honest, it wasn’t his father he ran away from. It was from the realization – at fourteen, within a harsh blizzard, bloodbending his own kin – that nothing could stop him from getting anything he wanted, but himself.

(And he wasn’t sure if he could.)

 

* * *

 

Amon resurfaces and the bubble pops.

His mask isn’t hiding much, not really; there’s a drop of blood right at the center of his forehead, and the mouth is painted to a fixated frown. It’s as apparent as a soul could ever be.

 

(Noatak remains in the depth of his mind, drowning.)

(It almost feels like peace.)

 

* * *

 

Amon touches a lot of people. People he doesn’t want to touch. People who don’t want him to touch them.

He has too, though. He always had to do stuff he didn’t want to.

Now, he has to make them all equal.

(When everyone’s equal, no one has to bend.)

(No one has to break.)

Their energy – their bending – slides against his as he snuffs it away, and each time takes wandering smithereens of Amon with it.

The mask stays solid, but he’s starting to crack.

 

* * *

 

 

Then he’s drowning – drowning for real, this time, and loath as he might, it’s his water bending that pulls him up into the air, crushing his vision and his hopes.

When everyone stares up at him with scorn and dismay, there’s a glimmer of a memory piercing through.

 _(“He took your bending away.”_ _He sneers at his father. “What could be more powerful than that?”)_

Noatak knows the answer to that, by now.

He runs back home.

 

* * *

 

 

His brother is slumped in his cell, as he’d left him. Even with his hair oily and lank, his clothes dank and his bending taken from him, to Noatak, he still seems glowing. Tarrlok had grown into a handsome man, though never a stranger; with their mother’s kind eyes, he’d always shine through a crowd. In the abandoned building, among the rats, the pull of his blood is an inviting as it ever was.

“It’s over brother.” He keeps his words brief; time is of essence. There are already people coming for him – for them – they must leave, now. “I’m sorry for what I had to do to you.”

“Our father set us on this path.” Tarrlok speaks, surprising them both. His voice had grown deep throughout the years, but his tone hadn’t changed. “Fate caused us to collide. I should’ve left with you, when we were boys.”

Noatak tinkers with the keys for the lock, and doesn’t tell him that he’s wrong. That he was right to stay, to be there with mother. That he was right to keep himself safe, as much as he possibly could, stuck with the lesser evil between the two.

“Leave with me now.” He offers, instead, because without his mask, he truly is nothing.

(When we are both men, he doesn’t say.)

“We have a second chance. We can start over, together.”

Tarrlok’s silence is deafening, even if it only lasts for a heartbeat.

“Please.” Noatak pleads, without his bubble to keep him safe. “You’re all that I have left in the world.”

His little brother was always a bleeding heart.

(Their father plunged the first dagger, but Noatak followed, straight onto his heart.)

 

* * *

 

The ocean is all-encompassing around them, as their boat glides through the water onto the horizon. There’s a silence between them, full of unspoken things, when the future lays ahead, inviting.

“The two of us together again.” Noatak says, looking forwards at nothing in particular, shaping reality with his words. “There’s nothing we can’t do.”

“Yes, Noatak.” His brother replies obediently at the back of the boat, and Noatak can feel his brother’s blood thrumming in his veins, offbeat.

“Noatak.” He relishes. “I’ve almost forgotten the sound of my own name.”

( _On your lips_ , he doesn’t say.)

“It would be just like the good old days.” Tarrlok says, and the lie sounds so sweet when it brushes against him, full of promise.

 

(And the tear slips down his cheek, because Noatak knows their future together, and lets himself mourn a moment before it all ends.)

**Author's Note:**

> planning to post part 2 tomorrow  
> comments and feedback are much appreciated and loved!♥


End file.
